St. Pierre, Lesnar Balance UFC Ticket

Jul 15, 2009

Georges
St. Pierre spent his Saturday night successfully defending the
welterweight title against number one contender Thiago Alves
at UFC 100. The one-sided would-be super fight saw St. Pierre win
all five rounds, even as he gutted out the last two with a groin
injury at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas.

Afterwards, St. Pierre cemented his reputation as a textbook
sportsman by lauding his opponent. He remained modest about his
chances against middleweight champion Anderson
Silva in a rumored cross-division duel -- the only potential
fight in all of mixed martial arts that has the same box office
pull as the Brock
Lesnar vs. Fedor
Emelianenko bout UFC President Dana White has promised fans
several times over.

Brock Lesnar was also hard at work at UFC 100, successfully
unifying the heavyweight crown by turning Frank Mir’s
face into a post-modern painting. Impressive as he was in victory,
Lesnar’s post-fight antics overshadowed both his own performance
and St. Pierre’s, as the genetic freak of the Dakotas tried to
restart his fight with Mir, announced plans for carnal relations
with his wife and ripped Bud Light, the UFC’s biggest sponsor. In a
few short minutes, Lesnar managed to join the likes of Terrell
Owens and Ric Flair and come off as a crass sore winner who cannot
even shake his opponent’s hand or look like anything but a muscled
mass of egomania.

Flipping off the fans and mortifying your bosses may sell tickets
bearing your name in the short term, but most everyone gets tired
of the childish villain routine sooner or later. Back in the 1990s,
Lesnar would have been right at home, as that decade saw athletes
like Deion Sanders and Barry Bonds make millions while living in a
me-first world that rewarded them for their on-the-field brilliance
as long as the bottom line stayed in the black. Unfortunately for
Lesnar, this decade begs for someone like St. Pierre; people look
at the Lesnars of the world and decide class acts like Peyton
Manning and Tiger Woods deserve the true superstar status.

You can thank the backlash from the steroids era and fans growing
tired of seeing their favorite athletes get dragged into court on a
regular basis for the fall of the sports anti-hero. Not
surprisingly, Lesnar could care less, while St. Pierre maintains a
carefully crafted image that has kept him in the good graces of his
fans and bosses. Being the golden child, however, does not change
the fact that Lesnar was the headliner on Saturday and would sell
more tickets than St. Pierre anywhere outside of Canada.

That may seem like an anomaly, but every top-tier athlete like
Lesnar enjoys a honeymoon period. Tito Ortiz
spent years at the top of the game despite openly ducking Chuck
Liddell, all the while slowly but surely alienating fans with
equal doses of arrogance and inactivity. The frustration meted out
to fans was second only to the hit the UFC had to take, as it spent
years trying to make a light heavyweight title bout between Ortiz
and Liddell, only to see the matchup materialize after it had lost
its chokehold on the minds of MMA fans.

Photo by Sherdog.com

Lesnar will be a headache to
Dana White for years to come.

Dealing with an egomaniac is a dicey proposition, but the UFC needs
someone like Lesnar around as long as it keeps him on a short
leash. No one is going to confuse the hulking heavyweight champion
for an MMA ambassador, so the extent of damage his mouth can do is
limited as long as he keeps key sponsors out of his verbal
crosshairs and avoids anything felonious. After all, Mike Tyson
spent years knocking human beings silly and generally coming off as
Brooklyn’s answer to Alex DeLarge before legal woes finally
torpedoed his career and the American public grew sick of cheering
for someone who sickened it. As of right now, Lesnar is a
polarizing figure, but he still enjoys the support of many fans who
cheer him on instead of merely cheering for his defeat.

That’s the kind of figure you need to effectively promote a sport,
but it does not work without someone like St. Pierre to balance the
ticket. In a bizarre sort of way, St. Pierre and Lesnar are tied to
one another as the opposing sides of the same coin. As the two most
bankable commodities in all of MMA, the future prospects of the UFC
are heavily connected to how they handle being at the top of the
totem pole. While St. Pierre feels the pressure to re-establish his
greatness, Lesnar has to prove his own without letting the
theatrics of his World Wrestling Entertainment days turn him into a
caricature.

The ongoing argument over which man is better for the UFC is
pointless; you’re never going to have an army of St. Pierres
leading the way, and you’ll always miss having someone like Lesnar
around to drive the fans into a frenzy. A thin line that separates
Lesnar from asset and liability, but the same could have been said
about Ortiz, and he still played a key role in the UFC’s ongoing
siege on mainstream American sports. Once Ortiz forgot the UFC
could survive without him, he became a liability and was quickly
erased from the memories of his once-rabid fans by the UFC’s
ruthless business machinations.

That’s not something the UFC will ever have to worry about with St.
Pierre, which is why the French-Canadian virtuoso remains a safe
bet to become a crossover star. The opposite holds true for Lesnar,
who will be a headache for White for years to come. Still, what he
brings to the table makes him well worth the price of admission.
Just how long that remains true is up to Lesnar, but that’s not
something about which anyone should worry. There’s never a shortage
of talented athletes willing to revel in the bad guy persona, and
Lesnar will hardly be the last to serve that role for the UFC.

Asking who means more to the UFC, St. Pierre or Lesnar, implies the
promotion could get by without them. While Tyson was knocking
people senseless, a young British heavyweight named Lennox Lewis
was on his way up the ranks. Articulate, well-mannered and
undeniably talented, the combat sports world flocked to him as the
smooth chaser to the harsh aftertaste of the Tyson era. Now,
instead of having one or the other, the UFC has both under the same
banner, and that’s what matters most.

At this moment, the last barriers to the mainstream are falling,
and the sport needs every single edge it can get when it’s so close
to pulling off the impossible. After all, why settle for Tyson when
you can have Lewis, too? The best part is that St. Pierre is a far
better dancer than both and Lesnar has not yet shown a taste for
human flesh. At this rate, they might someday star in an NBC sitcom
together in which they play mismatched roommates. Is that not what
going mainstream is all about?